November 09 Hauls

[Rumpy]

Pure, best dirt bike/atv game since Excitebike 64. It's like SSX with wheels. Looks great, plays great, the trick/turbo system really puts it over the top. There's real skill to the game to get to the end.

That teams next game is Split Second, def going to check it out since Pure is so good.

Check out Grid for some damn good street racing. And check out the demo for NFS: Shift. That one took me by surprise, I haven't had the chance to play the whole game yet.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

Split Second looks hot, confirmed!

[Jeremy]

Forza 3 has been made really newb-friendly, so I think you MIGHT like it if you don't like sims. Try out the demo first though. GRiD is awesome - probably my favorite racer overall this gen, and Pure is the best ATV racer out there. DiRT 1 and 2 are both up there with Rallisport Challenge 2 as far as being my favorite off-road racers. Fuel is garbage though - avoid it.

Oh yeah, hauls! I bought the UFC: Ultimate 100 Blu-Ray from Best Buy's site for $55 - about half off the MSRP, so yeah, I'm gonna be happy with that once it arrives. Plus, I'll be getting the God of War Collection and Tekken 6 early next week as well.

[mollipen]

Demon's Souls does not say "hello." It says "I'm going to try to trick you into mistaking difficulty for depth."

Uncharted 2 hasn't say anything to me yet, but Uncharted 1 said "I'm a watered-down Gears of War with worse controls, gimmicky grenade throwing that I guess gets a free pass since I'm on PS3 and not Wii, and Saturday Morning Fox Kids Cartoon humor."

Your post is telling me not to listen to your tastes in games.

[koda]

On Steam earlier this month:

- Dragon Age: Origins Digital Deluxe Edition
- Mass Effect

And then I bought a bunch of hardcover Realms books. Wasn't cheap.

[kingoffighters]

You don't need that much toilet paper.

[A Robot Bit Me]

Your post is telling me not to listen to your tastes in games.

Fair enough. I don't think Demon's Souls is a bad game, I just think we're generally so starved for challenge that we've begun idealizing good-but-not-great stuff like Etrian Odyssey and Demon's Souls. It's an above average action game that happens to be remarkably difficult. There really isn't much to the combat. It's mostly just lock on, move around until they whiff, stab them, repeat.

[mollipen]

The problem is, that's starting to sound too much like the "the game is cheap, not difficult" argument, which is completely untrue if you've played the game for any amount of time. Plus, Demon's Souls isn't just about its difficulty - it's also pretty interesting in a number of other ways. Is it this amazing experience without faults? No, of course not. But I think the game "gets" a lot of little elements that too many other titles simply don't understand, and that's what makes it a fun experience.

There's also a very easy test to see who really knows the game and who has just played it enough to bitch about it: the lock on. Anybody who uses lock on save a few rare occasions is still at that point where they aren't playing the game for real.

[Dyne]

Doshi just made it real.

[A Robot Bit Me]

Huh? It's a completely different argument. Cheap is when proficiency in the game's mechanics isn't enough, and sheer memorization is required to progress. Bullets/enemies that appear faster than can be reacted to in shooters and fake blocks/stretches of floor in so many NES games (Castlevania 2, Megaman Whatever) epitomize cheapness. Demon's Souls doesn't really suffer from that stuff.

From Software and Cavia are similar in that they have wonderful ideas and know what makes a game good, but at some point their ambition writes a cheque that their talent can't cash. But yeah, it's definitely a step in the right direction. I mean, the developers of WET probably thought they had a masterpiece on their hands, which is a scary thing!